Or it’s 1971. She’s famous. She’s on the cover of Newsweek. She smiles and says, “I warned you, William. Years ago, I told you I was dangerous. Remember that? And now I belong to the ages.”
Or it’s 1980, or 1985, and the war is over, and she’s one of the last of the die-hard rads. Her skin is leathery. Her eyes show the effects of windburn and fatigue. “Terrorism,” she repeats, “is a state of mind, but nobody gets terrified anymore.”
And now it’s late in the century, it’s 1995, and I’m digging, and I see sharpshooters and a burning safe house and the grotesque reality of the human carcass. The dead won’t stop dying. Ned and Ollie and Tina, all of them, they die in multiples, they can’t call it quits.
Then 1967.
Mid-March, a Sunday afternoon, and Sarah slips into my dorm room. She takes off her clothes and does a handstand at the center of my bed.
Even then, I suppose, she was something of a terrorist.
“Lucky William,” she’d sigh. “This relationship can’t last, you know. A law of nature, I’m just a higher form of life.”
At times it seemed she was right. Different species, almost, certainly different social classes, and yet over the final months of our junior year at Peverson State, as cause led to effect, Sarah and I somehow managed to make it work. We studied together, ate together, eventually slept together.
Even now, with the advantage of hindsight, I’m not sure what she saw in me. Maybe a counterpoint to her own charm; maybe a challenge. Cute, she’d sometimes call me, but I knew better—too skinny and angular and gawky. I had no poise, no presence. I’d often glance into windows or mirrors, obliquely, trying to catch myself unawares, to see myself as Sarah would, but the results were always depressing. I couldn’t find the cuteness. It was a strained, almost haggard face, blond hair gone sandy brown, blue eyes set back in deep dark sockets—grim-looking, I thought.
Still, she liked me. Not quite romance, just an intense collaboration of spirit. She kept me on my toes. Sudden shifts in mood, a heavy emphasis on coercion.
Extremism, after all, was her specialty and those were extreme times. There was a nip in the air. The music was militant. In Vietnam, more than 400,000 Americans were at war, and at home, even in Montana, apprehension had come to discontent.
“No more bullshit,” Sarah said, “there’s a war on,” then she went to work.
At the end of March, she orchestrated a series of teach-ins and classroom boycotts; in the first week of April she led a torchlight parade along the Little Bighorn—a pep rally for peace—half protest, half party.
How she did it, exactly, or why, I’m not sure, but by May Day politics had become respectable at Peverson State College, trendy and stylish. Again, the images blend and collide, but I remember pom-poms and cartwheels and barricades in front of Old Main. I can see Tina Roebuck silhouetted against a bonfire along the river. And I can see Ollie Winkler, who grins and spits on his hands as he wires up a stink bomb in the school auditorium. His eyes are nasty. “You don’t make a revolution,” he tells me, “without breaking a few legs.”
Mostly, though, I remember Sarah. She made things happen. Glamour, yes, and a flair for the dramatic, but she was also tough and practical, no tolerance for abstraction. “It’s combat,” she’d say. “Philosophy’s fine, but you don’t hem and haw on the front lines. You haul in the artillery.”
Intelligence, that was part of it. And she also had a rare intuitive gift for the process of push and shove. She brought glitter to bear, and at times a certain ruthlessness.
Cheerleader to rabble-rouser: It was a smooth, almost effortless transition. Surprising, maybe, and yet the impulse was there from the start. In a sense, I realized, cheerleaders are terrorists. All that zeal and commitment. A craving for control. A love of pageantry and crowds and slogans and swollen rhetoric. Power, too. The hot, energizing rush of absolute authority: Lean to the left, lean to the right. And then finally that shrill imperative: Fight—fight—fight! Don’t politicians issue the same fierce exhortations? Isn’t sex an active ingredient in the political enterprise? Pressing flesh, wooing the voters, stroking the Body Politic—aren’t these among the secret lures of any cheerleader?
Too simplistic, no doubt, but during the spring of 1967 the parallels seemed uncanny.
Sarah had the touch.
Her generalship was impeccable. Her demands were unqualified.
In public, but also in bed, she was a born leader.
“Passion,” she’d say. “Make me squirm.”
She’d use the bed like a trampoline. She’d lock her legs around me, tight, keeping the pressure on until I begged her to ease off.
Then she’d snort.
“Caution-caution,” she’d say. “No zip or zing. Can’t cut loose.”
“It’s not that.”
“It is that. I mean, here I am—perky Sarah—show me some sizzle, man. A girl wants to feel wanted.”
“But I can’t just—”
“Sizzle!”
She’d kneel beside me. Coyly, without shame, she’d do a little trick with her breasts, an expanding-flattening thing.
She might smile.
“Now that,” she’d say, “is what I call perkiness. Mona Lisa with muscles. And besides, I’m fond of you. God knows why—opposites attract, I guess—but it’s all yours. Everything. The entire perky package.”
“Nice,” I’d say, “it’s a nice package.”
“So what’s the holdup?”
“Nothing. Time, that’s all.”
“I’m loyal, William. I won’t desert you. I’ve got sticking power, you know? High fidelity.”
“I know that.”
“So?”
I’d shake my head and say, “Give it time.”
Sometimes she’d nod, sometimes not.
“Well, that’s very prudent,” she’d finally say, “but see, here’s the problem. Life has this weird quality called shortness. Places to go, minds to blow. It’s love I want. Worship.”
And then she’d straddle me.
She’d twirl her tongue against my throat.
“Don’t be bashful,” she’d whisper. “Yank out the cork, man, let’s go steady.”
The human heart, how do you explain it?
I was gun-shy. I didn’t trust her. Too temperamental, I thought. Too flashy.
A campus celebrity, wasn’t she?
That whole aura—the rattlesnake eyes, the pink polish on her toenails, the plucked and penciled eyebrows—an exhibitionist, a compulsive show-off. In the warm weeks of late spring, it wasn’t uncommon to find her sunbathing out in front of the student union, oiled up and elegant, flaunting her assets in a string bikini and high-heeled sandals. She’d come to class in spangled red shorts; she’d show up for dinner in pearls and mesh stockings and a fake fox coat. When I asked about all this, Sarah would only shrug: “The Age of Image,” she’d tell me. “Project or perish, it’s that simple.”
But it wasn’t simple. The psychological contradictions were stunning. An intelligent girl, she played the coquette; a dignified girl, she played vulgar. And yet she was also oddly vulnerable, even little-girlish at times. She could be gentle; she could be vicious. It wasn’t a split personality, it was fractured.
How could I take the risk?
In part, no doubt, I was held back by the old doomsday principle, an unwillingness to expose myself. But it was more than that.